Patching maven-surefire-plugin… yet again!

People have been using the 2.4-collab-SNAPSHOT of maven-surefire-plugin for a long time. The main reason for that was that the ‘official’ 2.4-SNAPSHOT was … incompatible with the latest TestNG versions.
Thankfully, 2.4, 2.4.1 and 2.4.2 official versions have been recently released (Jan-Feb 2008) and TestNG support is back to normal. OR is it?
Well, according to SUREFIRE-463 (disclaimer: i filed and provided the patch for that) you’re NOT able to run custom TestNG suite XML files, i.e. use the suiteXmlFiles configuration of the plugin, as described here.
So, if you too are bitten by that issue, go ahead and vote for it.